[Info-vax] [OT] Current students apparently can't read Fortran code...

[Bob Gezelter]

On Wednesday, April 13, 2022 at 7:05:00 PM UTC-4, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> On 4/13/22 3:10 PM, Simon Clubley wrote: 
> > From https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/13/climate_mit_fortran/ 
> > 
> > |CLiMA made the determination that old climate models, many of which were 
> > |built 50 years ago and coded in Fortran, had to go if there was going to be 
> > |any progress toward better climate models. Now that he's working at MIT on 
> > |the CGC project, he's realized that "traditional climate models are in a 
> > |language [MIT] students can't even read." 
> > 
> > Can't read the latest symbol-based (instead of word-based) language 
> > without lots of study ? Ok, that's a fair thing to say. 
> > 
> > But Fortran ??? Wow.
> Um, the code written in the 1960s and 1970s as mentioned in the article 
> was probably not Fortran 77 or even Fortran 66. Unless I'm in a Star 
> Trek episode and 1977 actually came before the 1960s and most of the 
> 1970s. Fortran IV was limited to 6-character identifiers and used 
> Hollerith constants. Functions and subroutines were not available so you 
> would tend to see programs tens of thousands of lines long with GOTO all 
> over the place. It was unreadable to me when learning VAX Fortran in 
> 1983, so I can sympathize with someone who knows C++ or Java trying to 
> make sense of it now.
Craig,

FORTRAN II (IBM 1620, circa 1960, 20K digits of storage) had full subroutines and functions.

Admittedly, many of these codes were not written to modern engineering standards, but one can decode them. Been there, done that (both in modern times, and when I was an undergraduate).

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com